The following is a list of characters from the television series Twin Peaks.

Overview[link]

Concepts[link]

Creation of BOB[link]

Frank Silva was a set decorator who worked on the pilot episode. One day, when he was moving furniture in Laura Palmer's bedroom, a woman remarked to Silva not to get locked in the (Laura Palmer's) room. The image of Silva trapped in the room sparked something in Lynch, who then asked Silva if he was an actor. Silva replied "Yes", and Lynch told him that he had a role in mind for him on the series. Silva accepted, and Lynch shot footage of him behind Laura's bed with no real idea of what he would do with it.

When Lynch shot the scene of Sarah Palmer's frightening vision, Silva's reflection was accidentally caught in the footage. Silva can be seen in the mirror behind Sarah Palmer's head. Lynch was made aware of this accident, but decided to keep Silva in the scene.

Laura Palmer[link]

To save on money, Lynch intended to cast a local girl from Seattle "just to play a dead girl".^[4] The local girl ended up being Sheryl Lee. "But no one — not Mark, me, anyone — had any idea that she could act, or that she was going to be so powerful just being dead."^[4] Indeed, the image of Lee wrapped in plastic became one of the show's most enduring and memorable images. And then, while Lynch shot the home movie that James takes of Donna and Laura, he realized that Lee had something special. "She did do another scene — the video with Donna on the picnic — and it was that scene that did it."^[4] As a result, Sheryl Lee became a semi-regular addition to the cast, appearing in flashbacks as Laura, and becoming a recurring character—Maddy, Laura's cousin who also becomes another victim of BOB.

MIKE, the One-Armed Man[link]

MIKE's appearance in the pilot episode was only originally intended to be a "kind of homage to The Fugitive. The only thing he was gonna do was be in this elevator and walk out."^[4] However, when Lynch wrote the "Fire walk with me" speech, he imagined MIKE saying it in the basement of the Twin Peaks hospital – a scene that would appear in an alternative version of the pilot episode, and surface later in Agent Cooper's dream sequence. MIKE's full name, Phillip Michael Gerard, is also a reference to Lieutenant Philip Gerard, a character in The Fugitive.

The Man from Another Place[link]

Lynch met Michael J. Anderson in 1987. After seeing him in a short film, Lynch wanted to cast the actor in the title role in Ronnie Rocket, but the project ultimately fell through. While editing the alternate ending of the foreign version of the pilot episode, an idea occurred to Lynch on his way home one day: "I was leaning against a car — the front of me was leaning against this very warm car. My hands were on the roof and the metal was very hot. The Red Room scene leapt into my mind. 'Little Mike' was there, and he was speaking backwards... For the rest of the night I thought only about The Red Room."^[4]

Law enforcement[link]

Special Agent Dale Cooper[link]

Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is the lead protagonist of the series. Dale Cooper is an FBI agent who arrives in Twin Peaks in 1989 to investigate the brutal murder of popular high-school student Laura Palmer. He falls in love with the town and gains a great deal of acceptance within the tightly knit community. Cooper displays an array of quirky mannerisms, such as giving a "thumbs up" when satisfied, sage-like sayings, and a distinctive sense of humor, along with his love for cherry pie and "a damn fine cup of coffee." One of his most popular habits is recording spoken-word tapes to a mysterious woman called "Diane" into a microcassette recorder he always carries with him, which often contains everyday observations and abstract thoughts on his current case. His investigative techniques go far beyond the usual ones employed by the FBI, including intuitive exercises and analysis of his dreams. He becomes deeply involved with the inhabitants of Twin Peaks, and remains in town after the resolution of the Laura Palmer case.

Albert Rosenfield[link]

Albert Rosenfield, played by Miguel Ferrer, is a talented forensic analyst who is called in by Dale Cooper to assist on the Laura Palmer case. Having a highly abrasive and mocking personality, Rosenfield alienated the Twin Peaks sheriff's department relatively quickly, comparing Andy to a dog, and enraging Sheriff Harry S. Truman to the point where Truman punched Rosenfield. He also rowed with Doc Hayward, and was very disparaging about the capabilities of the local police and medical facilities, showing respect only to his FBI colleagues, at least at first. He warms up to the townsfolk as the series progresses, but does not lose his sharp and ironic manner.

A later appearance, and another conflict with Sheriff Truman, led to an emotional moment where Rosenfield exposed a sensitive and peace-loving side, seemingly at odds with his acerbic surface persona and to the complete shock of the sheriff and viewers alike. Such complex, contradictory characters were typical of Twin Peaks and the works of David Lynch in general.

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Albert had a minor role, and appeared in the F.B.I. offices with Gordon Cole during the reappearance of Phillip Jeffries.

He is also briefly in The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, under the entry recorded on 4 February 1977 - it is implied that this is Dale Cooper's and his first meeting. This makes Albert 21 when the two first meet, according to the My Life, My Tapes canon.

Chester Desmond[link]

Chester Desmond, played by Chris Isaak, is a Special Agent with the FBI who is called out by his boss, Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, to investigate the murder of a 17-year-old girl named Teresa Banks, who was found wrapped in plastic. Desmond is introduced to his new partner, Special Agent Sam Stanley, and receives coded clues in the form of Lil the Dancer. Desmond and Stanley then begin their investigation by driving to a rural town called Deer Meadow.

A few days into the investigation, Desmond mysteriously disappears after picking up a ring later seen to be owned by the Man from Another Place. His disappearance is reported to Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole, who then dispatches Special Agent Dale Cooper to pick up where Desmond left off. Desmond's disappearance is never explained, although Cooper discovers that Desmond's car has been vandalized with the words "LET'S ROCK," the same words spoken by the Man from Another Place when he introduces himself, implying that he was taken to the Black Lodge.

FBI Special Agent Sam Stanley[link]

FBI Special Agent Sam Stanley, played by Kiefer Sutherland, assists Special Agent Desmond in the investigation of the murder of Teresa Banks. Gordon Cole mentions that he cracked the Whitman case. He is portrayed as being somewhat stiff and inflexible, in contrast to the laid-back demeanor of Desmond; at one point Desmond manages to make Stanley spill coffee on himself when he asks what time it is (noticing that Stanley is holding his cup with his watch hand).

Stanley was mentioned in the series pilot, during the scene in which Agent Cooper is examining Laura Palmer's body. He speaks into his dictaphone something along the lines of: "Don't bring it to Sam, Albert's a little more on the ball with this."

Phillip Jeffries[link]

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Phillip Jeffries, played by David Bowie, suddenly exits an elevator in the Philadelphia FBI office, two years after his disappearance. He hurries to the office of his former superior, Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole and starts raving in a loud and disturbed manner, referring at one stage to Special Agent Cooper and yelling “Who do you think this is, there?”

Jeffries goes on to narrate where he has been since his disappearance. He mentions names and incidents that are unfamiliar to those listening. His words are illustrated by the intrusion of a ghost transmission showing a small group of characters, including The Man From Another Place and BOB, in a series of strange rooms.

He disappears into thin air once again after announcing “I found something... and then there they were!”

Gordon Cole[link]

Gordon Cole (played by David Lynch, and also named for a minor character in Sunset Boulevard^[5]) is a Regional Bureau Chief in the FBI and Agent Cooper's immediate superior. He is very hard-of-hearing (wearing large hearing aids) and thus speaks very loud. He often misunderstands what is said to him and replies with comically inappropriate responses. Cole’s coded messages sometimes baffle even his closest colleagues. In the first episode he appears, he says, “Cooper, you remind me today of a small Mexican chihuahua.” The conversation continues as normal, with the issue remaining unsolved.

While in Twin Peaks, Cooper and Cole go to the Double R Diner where he is smitten by waitress Shelly Johnson, whom to his surprise he can hear perfectly well. Shelly, being ignored by her boyfriend Bobby Briggs at the time, is shocked yet pleased by his attention, and upon his imminent departure they share a kiss, to the chagrin of Bobby, who happens to show up at that moment.

At the beginning of Fire Walk With Me, Cole briefs agents Chester Desmond and Sam Stanley on their assignment to investigate the murder of Teresa Banks. Cole uses a coded language, in the attire and gestures of Lil the Dancer, to inform the agents of what to expect in their investigation. Cole describes the Teresa Banks murder case as one of his “blue rose” cases. The exact meaning of this is never given, but fans have speculated that a “blue rose” case is one involving the supernatural.

Denise/Dennis Bryson[link]

Denise or Dennis Bryson was played by David Duchovny, who would later go on to play another more famous agent: Special Agent Fox Mulder of the FBI in The X-Files. The character’s binary identity reflects the dualistic leitmotif of the series.

It is unclear from the series whether Bryson would self-identify as a cross-dresser, a transvestite or transgender. Bryson began wearing women's clothing during a DEA undercover operation and found that it relaxed him. Bryson identifies as "Denise," wears women's clothing and presents female behavior during working hours and otherwise. When required for a sting operation, Bryson dons a man's suit and goes by "Dennis."

Bryson comes to Twin Peaks when Dale Cooper is accused by the Mounties and the FBI of misfeasance for his handling of the rescue of Audrey Horne from One Eyed Jacks and the alleged theft of cocaine from an RCMP stakeout. Cooper quickly determines that the "Mountie" accusing him is himself involved in drug dealing with Jean Renault and Hank Jennings. This leads to the standoff at Dead Dog Farm, in which Bryson's "feminine side" allows her to effect the rescue of Agent Cooper.

Harry Truman[link]

Harry Truman (played by Michael Ontkean) is Twin Peaks' sheriff, who assists Special Agent Dale Cooper in the investigation of the murder of Laura Palmer. Harry is in love with the fragile Josie Packard, and is also one of the Bookhouse Boys.

Harry and Cooper hit it off almost from the start. Harry is very down-to-earth in contrast with Cooper's unconventional methods of policing, fascination with Tibet, dreams, etc. Harry regards Cooper as somewhat eccentric but well-meaning. In early episodes, Harry serves to introduce Cooper (and hence the viewer) to the more prominent residents of Twin Peaks. Harry states that he begins to feel that he is Dr. Watson to Cooper's Sherlock Holmes. Despite their differences, Truman represents a literary alternate to Cooper: they approach the same goal through different means.

As the case progress, Harry's respect for Cooper grows. He regards Coop as "the finest lawman he has ever known". He vehemently defends Cooper to the FBI when Cooper is suspended for allegedly trafficking drugs across the Canadian border, and assists him in rescuing Audrey Horne from One-Eyed Jacks.

Harry shares his name with Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States. A picture of President Truman appears in his office. Additionally, a stuffed and mounted buck's head on his office wall has a placard reading "The Buck Stopped Here" hanging from it, a reference to the famous "The buck stops here" sign President Truman put on his desk.

Harry's passionate love for Josie Packard is such that it blinds him to the fact that she is merely using him, as she has used many other people. When she dies suddenly after murdering Thomas Eckhardt, Harry falls into a deep depression and takes to drinking. He manages to turn himself around when Eckhardt's personal assistant Jones makes an attempt to murder him which he thwarts.

Following this, Harry resumes being the dedicated partner to Cooper he was before. When Cooper disappears into the Black Lodge Harry tirelessly waits for hours, until his sudden reappearance.

Andy Brennan[link]

Andy Brennan, played by Harry Goaz, is a deputy for the Twin Peaks sheriff's department. Andy is a bit slow, even "dimwitted", and very sensitive, tending to cry at murder scenes. He is also very loyal and trustworthy, prompting a disparaging comparison to a dog by Albert Rosenfield. Andy has been seeing the secretary of sheriff's department, Lucy Moran. She, however, has grown tired of him, and seeks adventure by seeing Dick Tremayne. Andy is initially jealous of Dick's relationship with his former girlfriend; however the two later bond over Dick's temporary foster son Nicky. Not much is revealed of Andy during the show, except through physical comedy, such as his inadequacy at handling guns and sticky tape. However, Andy improves his gun skills at the range, later shooting Jacques Renault when he tries to go for Sheriff Truman.

Andy was the one who (in Season Two) realized that the drawing was a map, and he therefore played a big part in FBI agent Dale Cooper's finding his way to the Black Lodge.

In the pilot, he is revealed as a trumpeter, albeit not a very good one. And he has a talent at drawing which is demonstrated when he sketches Bob from Sarah Palmer's vision, and again during the trial of Leland Palmer when he sketches the back of Leland's head.

Deputy Tommy "Hawk" Hill[link]

Deputy Tommy "Hawk" Hill is played by Michael Horse. Born in 1951, he works at the Twin Peaks sheriff's department under Sheriff Harry S. Truman. He is a Native American, but it is not made clear to which tribe he belongs, although during a discussion as to whether or not Tommy believes in the soul he references Blackfoot Indian mysticism to Special Agent Dale Cooper. He is usually referred to as "Hawk" because of his excellent tracking skills, which extend beyond animal and human tracks to those of cars and trucks. He is clearly aware of the supernatural presence in woods of Twin Peaks and also discusses with Cooper his belief in a direct connection to Native American spirituality. He is also the first person to verbally express to the viewers (as well as to Cooper) what the White Lodge and Black Lodge are.

One of the Bookhouse Boys and an all-around dependable guy, he saves the lives of both Truman and Cooper on more than one occasion. He has an unseen girlfriend who is a local veterinarian with a PhD from Brandeis.

Lucy Moran[link]

Lucy Moran, played by Kimmy Robertson, is a high-voiced, childlike blonde receptionist at the Twin Peaks' sheriff's department. She is seeing deputy sheriff Andy Brennan, until they have an argument. She reveals later that she was also seeing Dick Tremayne, who works at Horne's Department Store, after feeling frustrated with Andy. Lucy gets pregnant, which turns out to be the reason why she and Andy have been fighting. The paternity of the child is called into question when Andy reveals that he cannot be the father of the baby, due to low sperm count. He gets retested and finds out that he in fact could have been the father. This sparks off a competition between Andy and Dick Tremayne, both vying for Lucy's affection and the role of father to her child. This includes adopting "Little Nicky" through the Big Brothers program. After some particularly rude behavior from Dick, Lucy decides not to wait for the baby to be born in order to determine paternity and chooses Andy as the father of her child.

In 1990, Simon & Schuster Audio released a cassette entitled "Diane ...": The Twin Peaks Tapes of Agent Cooper which compiled many of the recorded diary entries of Cooper that had been featured in the first season and the beginning of the second, along with specially recorded entries including several taking place prior to the pilot episode. One of the specially recorded entries takes place the night of Cooper's arrival in Twin Peaks and has Lucy giving Cooper directions to the Great Northern Hotel.

Palmer family[link]

Laura Palmer[link]

Laura Palmer, (played by Sheryl Lee), was the town's favorite daughter; she volunteered at Meals on Wheels, was the high school Homecoming queen, and was (apparently) the darling of her parents, Sarah and Leland. However, Laura led a double life. She was a cocaine addict, a victim of incest, and a teenage prostitute. She had briefly worked at One Eyed Jacks, a casino/brothel just north of the Canadian border, until she was apparently fired for gratuitous cocaine usage.

The discovery of Laura's body in the pilot episode of Twin Peaks brought Special Agent Dale Cooper to town and the investigation of her death, and the effects it had on those around her propelled the first season and the first 9 episodes of the second season. Laura remained prominent afterward, as her death had exposed many secrets related to her, and also—in some cases—unrelated, such as the Packard mill conspiracy.

Laura's diary was uncovered in the first episode, but her secret diary was not recovered until much later, and it contained passages suggesting that she had long been the victim—sometimes willingly—of abuse from a malevolent entity named BOB, who wanted to be close to her, or even be her.

Leland Palmer[link]

Leland Palmer, played by Ray Wise, is an attorney, with his primary client being local businessman Ben Horne. He is well-known and respected in the town of Twin Peaks. Together with his wife Sarah and his daughter Laura, his family is seemingly perfect. When Laura is murdered, Leland’s psychological foundations begin to crumble. He suffers from multiple nervous breakdowns and during Laura's funeral flings himself into her grave and must be pulled out. He remains unstable for some time. Later it becomes apparent that Leland is possessed by BOB, and he is caught by Cooper and the police, but due to a cigarette's smoke that activates the sprinkler system, the BOB inside him explodes into madness and Leland essentially kills himself by bashing his head repeatedly against the iron door of his cell, freeing himself from BOB. Leland says that he regrets his actions, and tells Cooper that he did not want to harm Laura, but that BOB made him do it. He then apparently "sees" Laura, and apologizes to her, before dying.

Sarah Palmer[link]

Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie), is the mother of Laura Palmer and the wife of Leland Palmer. Laura is found murdered in the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. Sarah's husband Leland becomes unstable since the murder, and Sarah doesn't know what's going on. When Leland falls onto Laura's coffin at the funeral, Sarah tells him "Don't ruin this, too!" During the second season it is revealed that Leland killed Laura under the influence of evil spirit BOB. It is implied in the series, and confirmed in the prequel film, that Leland/BOB have been drugging Sarah in order to sexually abuse Laura.

Sarah is shown to have some paranormal powers, and she is known for (on some occasions) predicting the future or seeing people (Bob) no one else sees. In the Pilot, she has a vision of the other half of Laura's necklace (buried by James Hurley) being dug up and in a later episode sees BOB at the foot of Laura's bed. Prior to Maddy's murder, Sarah has a vision of a white horse in her living room. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me reveals that she had a similar vision just before Laura's murder. In the series finale Windom Earle speaks to Garland Briggs through Sarah, daring him to come to The Black Lodge to rescue Dale Cooper.

Maddy Ferguson[link]

Madeleine "Maddy" Ferguson (Sheryl Lee) first appears midway through the first season, when she travels to Twin Peaks from her hometown of Missoula, Montana (which happens to be David Lynch's real-life birthplace). She comes to help her uncle and aunt, Leland and Sarah Palmer, overcome the loss of Laura. Maddy seems to be a few years older than Laura, but otherwise looks identical, excluding Maddy's dark hair and bookish glasses. Maddy even remarks that she and Laura used to pretend they were sisters. Despite the visual similarity, the innocent and sweet Maddy stands in stark contrast to Laura, whose personal life is steeped in sex and deception. Like Laura's mother and Laura herself, Maddy has premonitions, including one of a bloodstain on the floor of the Palmers' living room and another of 'Bob', a demonic entity plaguing the town.

Maddy quickly befriends Donna Hayward and James Hurley, Laura's closest friends, and helps them in their investigation into Laura's death. At one point, Maddy even appears wearing a blonde wig in order to lure out one of Laura's acquaintances.

During the second season, Maddy begins to resemble her cousin more and more: her hair (though still dark) straightens, she stops wearing her glasses, and in her carriage and demeanor she behaves more like the character of Laura seen in the prequel movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me than the Maddy shown in the first season. This causes conflict with Donna and James when James becomes attracted to her, and she begins to return his feelings in spite of herself.

Eventually, she is murdered by Leland Palmer, who is possessed by 'Bob', in a violent recreation of Laura's murder. Maddy's death quickly leads to Leland's arrest. Resemblance to Laura may have been key to Maddy's murder, as it is revealed in Fire Walk With Me that Teresa Banks, the first of Leland's victims, was selected because "you look just like my Laura" (although the fact that she was planning to blackmail Leland also constitutes a valid motive). Additionally, in the episode where Leland is caught, Donna might have become victim #4 when Leland/Bob sees that Donna is wearing Laura's sunglasses, given to her earlier by Maddy.

Duality[link]

The notion of pairing similar or identical women with contrasting hair colors and personalities is one that arises frequently in Lynch's work, especially when it pertains to another individual obsessing over their shifting identities. Other pairs in this trend include Patricia Arquette's characters in Lost Highway and Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring's in Mulholland Drive. Duality is a strong feature in Twin Peaks, as implied by the name, not to mention the doppelgangers in the black lodge.^[6]

Hayward family[link]

Will Hayward[link]

Doctor William Hayward (played by Warren Frost) is a physician and coroner who, due to his close relationship with her, refuses to perform the autopsy on Laura Palmer. His first name is not generally used, but because he is referred to as "Will" in several episodes, it can be presumed to be "William"; he is normally referred to as just "Doc" most of the time.

He is the husband of Eileen and father of three daughters: Donna (who has by far the biggest role of the family), Harriet, and Gersten. The Doc is generally a balanced, fair man, but he is especially upset by Laura's murder, as he is a friend of the Palmer family, and his daughters knew her well.

Doc Hayward also has an altercation with the abrasive Albert Rosenfield, who calls his work "amateur", and wishes to do more work on Laura's corpse. Unlike most of the characters on Twin Peaks he appears to have no major nasty secrets, or eccentricities. However, towards the end of the second season, we learn he may have been cuckolded by Benjamin Horne, who might in fact be Donna's real father - a question left unresolved due to the series' cancellation. In the final episode, Doc Hayward attacks Benjamin and although it seems that Ben has been seriously injured (possibly killed), Doc Hayward shows up at the end of the episode relatively back to his normal temperament.

Eileen Hayward[link]

Eileen Hayward, played by Mary Jo Deschanel, is the wheelchair-bound wife of Doc Hayward and mother of Donna. Why she is disabled is never revealed during the series. Highly tolerant and decent in every sense, she seems to have a murky past concerning Benjamin Horne.

Donna Hayward[link]

Donna, played by Lara Flynn Boyle in the series and by Moira Kelly in the prequel, was the best friend of Laura Palmer, and after her death she became obsessed with finding out who killed her and why, with the help of James Hurley, Laura's secret boyfriend and Donna's new love interest, and Madeleine Ferguson, the look-a-like cousin of Laura.

At the end of season two, it is strongly suggested that Doc Hayward might not be Donna's biological father after all, and that she is in fact the daughter of Benjamin Horne and half-sister to Audrey Horne. However, due to the series' cancellation, this idea has not been elaborated upon.

Harriet Hayward[link]

Harriet, played by Jessica Wallenfels, is the middle child in Hayward family. Harriet is shown to be a poet. She appears twice in the series, and both times feature her reading poetry she has written. In the show's pilot, Donna asks Harriet to lie to their father while she sneaks out the bedroom window to meet James Hurley to discuss the death of Laura Palmer. Harriet, who is busy writing a poem, fails to adequately cover for her sister, however. Harriet's other appearance—the first episode of the second season, "May the Giant Be With You"—features her reading a rather eerie poem she wrote about Laura.

Harriet is best known^{[citation needed]} for the now infamous^{[citation needed]} line, "I'm gonna tell it to ya and I'm gonna tell it to you straight. You see that window?"

Gersten Hayward[link]

Gersten, played by Alicia Witt, is the youngest of three Hayward sisters. Unlike her sisters and her mother, Gersten is a redhead. She is skilful at playing the piano.

While a minor character on the show, the episode "May the Giant Be With You" ends with the credits rolling over footage of Gersten playing the piano. This is notable in that it is one of the few episodes that do not end with credits rolling over a static image, most often a photo of Laura Palmer. While some fans have passed off the footage as director David Lynch's way of showcasing Witt's talent, others have attempted to read more into the scene, much in the manner that fans read into countless other strange aspects of the series.

Horne family[link]

Ben Horne[link]

Ben Horne is one of the two richest and most powerful individuals of Twin Peaks; according to Sheriff Truman, Horne "owns half the town", including the Great Northern Hotel, the town's only apparent travel lodgings; the Great Northern also acts, on occasion, as a de-facto town hall, and the only place in Twin Peaks suitable for a wedding reception, making it one of the hubs of the community. In addition to the Great Northern, Ben owns and runs Horne's, the town's only department store, and One Eyed Jacks, a casino/brothel just over the Canadian border. His would-be monopoly on the town's economy is challenged only by Josie Packard, the owner of the Packard Saw Mill, one of the few major businesses in town which Horne doesn't own. At the outset of the series, Horne has been involved in an affair for some time with Catherine Martell, as part of an intricate plot to kill her, destroy the mill, become the beneficiary of her life insurance, and take sole ownership of the land on which the mill sits, which he intends to turn into a luxury country club. There is also speculation about Horne's previous involvement with Eileen Hayward, which leads to the suspicion as to whether he is Donna Hayward's biological father. During the second season he is briefly arrested on the suspicion of being the Laura Palmer's murderer. Due to the collapse of his business endeavours during his arrest, he suffers a nervous breakdown, falling into a delusional state for much of the season.

Jerry Horne[link]

Jeremy "Jerry" Horne (David Patrick Kelly) is the playboy brother of Ben Horne and the uncle of Audrey and Johnny. He was his brother's right-hand-man and emissary, traveling around the world to act in Ben's place for his international business dealings. Although he and Ben shared similar interests and characteristics — womanizing and cut-throat business dealings — Jerry publicly demonstrated all the negative traits which his brother hid beneath a veneer of sophistication and class. The brothers' contrasts were reflected in their attire: Ben wore tailored, neutral-coloured business suits, but Jerry dressed in a variety of bizarre, multi-colored outfits, seemingly culled from his trips around the world, and had a strange hairdo incorporating both the buzz cut and hi-top fade.

Jerry was a supporting character in the series, who did not receive his own plotline; he primarily served to give Ben an intellectually equal associate, because Ben was otherwise surrounded by low-level thugs such as Leo Johnson and Hank Jennings. Although not intelligent as his brother, Jerry demonstrated world-awareness beyond that of most of the town's population.

Audrey Horne[link]

Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) fits the image of a poor little rich girl, able to have anything she wants except for her father's love. She eventually discovers that Benjamin, the town's business magnate, gave his love to the deceased Laura Palmer, both physically and emotionally.

Audrey is labelled a troublemaker and she initially lives up to that expectation. In a memorable scene in the Twin Peaks pilot, she derails one of her father's business deals, worth millions of dollars, by interrupting a meeting of Norwegian investors and telling them about Laura's murder. Although Audrey and Laura were not friends, Audrey says she "kind of loved Laura" because Laura tutored Audrey's brother Johnny.

Johnny Horne[link]

Audrey's older, intellectually disabled brother Johnny is a peripheral character in the series. He is played by Robert Davenport in the pilot episode, and later by Robert Bauer - twice in the first season and once in the second season, as well as in the film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

At the Twin Peaks Festival 2011 in North Bend Washington, Jan D'Arcy (who plays Johnny's mother Sylvia) told the assembled crowd that there was a deleted scene from the second season of Twin Peaks, in which Sylvia confesses to Dr. Jacoby that as a girl, Audrey pushed her brother Johnny down a flight of stairs - resulting in his brain damage.

Packard family[link]

Josie Packard[link]

Josie (Joan Chen) is from Hong Kong, and is ethnic Chinese. Josie meets and marries Andrew Packard, owner of the Packard Mill, in Hong Kong and accompanies him to Twin Peaks. After Andrew's death in a boating accident, Josie inherits the mill, which is run by her sister-in-law Catherine. Catherine resents Josie for taking over the mill and suspects that Josie was responsible for Andrew's demise. Catherine's husband Pete Martell, a former woodcutter, is good friends with Josie, seeing her fragile side and striving to protect her. Through most of the first season, Josie seems innocent, an easy mark and potential victim for her more savvy and cunning sister-in-law and Catherine's lover, Ben Horne. It is only later that we learn that Josie is, in truth, a classic "femme fatale" whose innocence masks a manipulative and cold-blooded side.

After her husband's death, Josie starts dating the town sheriff Harry S. Truman. Agent Dale Cooper, in town investigating the murder of Laura Palmer, has befriended Truman, and quickly detects Truman's feelings for Josie, but does not himself trust her at all. He tries to warn Truman against getting too close to Josie, but to no avail. At the end of the first season, a mysterious caller shoots Cooper. He survives, thanks to a quick operation, but does not get a look at his assailant, who is later revealed to have been Josie.

Andrew Packard[link]

Andrew Packard (Dan O'Herlihy), a sprightly and high-spirited man in spite of his old age, was formerly the owner of the Packard Sawmill. He was supposedly killed in a boating accident brought about by Hank Jennings, working on behalf of Andrew's wife, Josie, and his former business partner, Thomas Eckhardt, a sinister businessman operating in the Far East. Later it is revealed that Andrew anticipated the attempt and went into hiding.

Andrew and his sister Catherine Martell have a mutual distrust, but are also mutually beneficent. Catherine seems to resent the fact that Pete, her husband, gets on very well with Andrew.

Before he is killed, Eckhardt leaves a mysterious puzzle to Andrew and Catherine. It is a box, with an astrological code on it, which in Russian doll fashion contains several other boxes within it. Andrew and Pete finally discover a key to a safety deposit for the local bank after Andrew shoots the smallest one with the large revolver he carries beneath his jacket.^[7]

When Andrew and Pete go to the bank and open the deposit, a bomb is triggered. The extent of the damage is unclear, as this happened in the final episode, but Andrew, Pete, and the bank clerk likely all died in the explosion (Audrey, chained to the bank vault door, was slated to have survived).

Catherine Martell[link]

Catherine (played by Piper Laurie), is the sister of Andrew Packard. She married lumberjack Pete Martell, but their happiness was short-lived. Though they remained married, Catherine holds her more simple and naive husband in contempt. After Andrew's death in a boating accident (actually brought about by his young Chinese wife Josie and Hank Jennings), Catherine runs the Packard mill, though Josie is the legal owner.

Catherine is having an affair with local businessman and landowner Ben Horne, with whom she is plotting to burn down the mill. Unknown to Catherine, Ben is also in cahoots with Josie, and the two of them are plotting to cut her out of the picture entirely, with the intent to eventually shut down the mill and develop the land for their own profit.

Pete Martell[link]

Pete (played by Jack Nance) is a lumberjack who married his boss' sister Catherine. What started as a "summer's indiscretion" developed into a marriage that from Pete's perspective never should have happened. "Catherine is plain hell to live with", he once admits during the course of the show. Catherine is ruthless, stubborn and determined and doesn't make anything easy for her husband (who she feels is a useless, soft old fool). However, it is also made clear that Catherine was far richer than he, so he has at least a financial consolation. Pete also seems to harbor some genuine, nostalgic affection for his wife, which he expresses to Sheriff Truman when he thinks Catherine has died.

He is a keen angler. While Catherine plots to get back her late brother's business, the Packard mill, from his widow Josie Packard whom she despises, Pete spends his time fishing ("There's a fish in the percolator!") and joking affectionately with Josie. Perhaps too good to be true, Josie is pure balm to Pete after Catherine's constant spite and contempt.

He is also an expert chess player, the best in town (and seemingly in a very large surrounding area), and helps Cooper in his deadly tournament against Windom Earle in season 2.

Briggs family[link]

Garland Briggs[link]

Major Garland Briggs (Don S. Davis) is a U. S. Air Force officer whose area of expertise appears to be paranormal activity, particularly Project Blue Book. He is the father of Bobby, whose smoking he cannot abide. His work is highly classified; he does not tell even his family about it. His name is probably taken from mathematician Garland Briggs, who worked with J. W. Alexander.

The role can be seen as a precursor to Davis’s character Lt. Gen. George Hammond on the series Stargate SG-1, who is also an Air Force officer involved in secret projects. His greatest fear, revealed under torture, is “the possibility that love is not enough.” Due to Major Briggs’s information, the entrance to the Black Lodge is discovered in the woods at Twin Peaks. He is himself abducted at one point (taken to the White Lodge?), and is told to deliver a message to Special Agent Dale Cooper by the Log Lady.

In the second season, Major Briggs and Bobby find some common ground and make up. Later in the second season we learn that Major Briggs is also the only person who can enter the waiting room without getting his soul annihilated.^{[citation needed]} Therefore if there was going to be a 3rd season, it has been rumored that he would have become an important factor for the rescue of Dale Cooper who is imprisoned in the Black Lodge.

Bobby Briggs[link]

Robert "Bobby" Briggs, played by Dana Ashbrook, was the boyfriend of Laura Palmer. His father is Major Garland Briggs, a member of the U.S. military, with whom he has an uneasy relationship. Bobby becomes jealous of James Hurley when he discovers that James was secretly seeing Laura. Laura, on the other hand, did not really love Bobby, merely using him as a source of cocaine.

The prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me shows that just two days before Laura Palmer's death, Bobby (accompanied by Laura) has a midnight meeting, arranged by Jacques Renault, with Cliff Howard, deputy in Deer Meadow, the town in which Teresa Banks was murdered the previous year. Howard is supplying Bobby with cocaine to be sold in Twin Peaks; when an inebriated Laura yanks the drugs out of his hands, Howard pulls a gun and is shot by Bobby. This scene serves to explain what James Hurley reported to Donna Hayward in the series' pilot — that Laura, the night she was murdered, had mentioned to him that someone had gotten killed.

Bobby was secretly seeing Shelly Johnson even before Laura's death, and they move in together when Leo Johnson becomes comatose.

Hurley/Jennings families[link]

Ed Hurley[link]

Big Ed Hurley, played by Everett McGill, runs the local gas station. He also looks after his nephew James Hurley.

His marriage to Nadine, who is constantly seesawing between being overbearing and highly depressed, ceased to be loving long ago, and seems driven primarily by his guilt over the hunting accident on their honeymoon where she lost her eye. Due to a misunderstanding he married her over his high-school sweetheart Norma Jennings. He has been carrying on an affair with Norma, but his guilt, along with the imminent release of Norma's violent husband Hank, causes them to break things off. They resume their affair after Nadine regresses into childhood and starts dating Mike; by the end of the season they announce their intention to be married, but Nadine's sudden recovery throws things into doubt.

He is also one of the Bookhouse Boys and as such serves as "unofficial deputy" to Sheriff Truman.

Nadine Hurley[link]

Nadine Hurley, played by Wendy Robie, is married to Big Ed and is well known in the town for her ferocity and eccentricity. Nadine wears a patch over her left eye, having lost it in a hunting accident on their honeymoon. Ed's guilt over the accident (and other things) is perhaps all that holds together their mostly unhappy marriage, as he would rather have married Norma Jennings, his high-school sweetheart.

Nadine spends the first few episodes of the series in a state of obsession with trying to create the world's first completely silent drape-runners. She is successful when her husband, Ed, accidentally spills mechanical grease on the cotton balls she is fixing to the runners. Nadine initially thinks this will make them both very rich, but alas it does not, because she was refused a patent, and she gives up hope that it could ever sell. She subsequently attempts suicide by overdosing on pills.

After falling into a coma instead, Nadine awakes believing herself to be a teenager in high school and, incidentally, just dating her husband. Her superhuman strength (already present in season one) allows her to enter the school's wrestling team—the first female to do so. Though the cause of her memory loss is left largely to the viewer's imagination, adrenaline is circuitously mentioned at one point by Dr. Hayward, as well as Dr. Jacoby's comment that "that tissue's packed in there pretty hard".

As season two progresses, Nadine and Ed decide to "break up", and she begins pursuit of teenage Mike Nelson (captain of the Twin Peaks wrestling team). This in turn leaves Ed free to pursue his true love, Norma.

In the final episode, Nadine suffers a blow to the head that results in the loss of her delusions of teenhood. Apparently, she has no memory of anything that has occurred since her suicide attempt. The full repercussions of her recovery, including the potential scuppering of Big Ed's and Norma's newly announced marriage plans, were left to be addressed in a third season that was never to be.

James Hurley[link]

James Hurley, played by James Marshall, lives with his uncle Ed and his aunt Nadine due to his troubled family situation: his father (probably Ed's brother), a musician, left mother and child behind when James was very young, while his mother, a writer, is an alcoholic who frequently sleeps with total strangers.

James is a keen motorcycle rider. He is only quiet on the outside. James frequently has problems with women. He was Laura Palmer's secret boyfriend. Bobby Briggs, Laura's boyfriend, resents James because of their relationship. After her death, he falls in love with his and Laura's best friend Donna Hayward. Later he is also attracted to Laura's look-alike cousin Maddy Ferguson, leading to disputes with Donna, who is similarly confused about her feelings for him. After Maddy's death, he leaves Twin Peaks and gets into trouble with Evelyn Marsh, who manipulates him for her own ends at first but then regrets it. After he is entangled in the conspiracy to murder her husband and exonerated, he decides he needs to get away from Twin Peaks and heads off to see the world. He is not seen again for the remainder of the series, but he professes his love for Donna and promises to come back for her.

Norma Jennings[link]

Norma Jennings, played by Peggy Lipton, is the owner of the Double R Diner, where she employs Shelly Johnson, a good friend of hers, and organizes the town's Meals on Wheels program, which Laura Palmer used to operate. She is a former Miss Twin Peaks, and becomes one of the judges at the latest pageant. She is later joined at the Diner by her sister Annie Blackburn, a former nun.

She does not care for her husband Hank, a paroled criminal, and has long regretted that she did not end up with high-school sweetheart Big Ed Hurley, whom she adores and is carrying on an affair with. She finds it difficult to trust Hank, because he is a criminal and has let her down in the past, but eventually gives him a chance by letting him work in the diner. What she would really like to do is to divorce Hank and marry Ed, but events continually prevent this. When Nadine regresses into her teenage years Ed and Norma see an opportunity to get married, but Nadine's sudden recovery throws things into jeopardy.

Norma has a bad relationship with her mother, which has presumably been a long-standing dislike, as Annie Blackburn briefly inquires about this upon coming to Twin Peaks, and doesn't argue when Norma tries to drop the subject. Their ties are broken for good when it turns out her mother is in fact a famous food critic who writes under a pseudonym, and ultimately gives the Double R Diner an unflattering review. Norma, who is appalled at her mother's lack of sympathy for what Norma has dedicated her life to, tells her she never wants to see her again.

Hank Jennings[link]

Hank Jennings, played by Chris Mulkey, is the criminal (and during the first few episodes imprisoned) husband of Norma Jennings.

He is a career criminal, albeit a more professional one than Leo Johnson. Bad to the bone, he is nevertheless able to put on a nice-guy appearance which manages to fool some people. According to Sheriff Harry S. Truman, Hank once was a member of the Bookhouse Boys, in fact "one of the best", before he was expelled for his criminal activities. In many ways, Hank serves as a moral counterpoint to Sheriff Truman.

Prior to the start of the series, Hank has been hired by Josie Packard to arrange the death of her husband Andrew, owner of the Packard Saw Mill, in a boating accident. (It is revealed that Andrew anticipated and secretly avoided this attempt on his life.) Hank used his apparent involvement in a drunken driving accident as an alibi for the night of Andrew's death and was convicted of manslaughter. At the beginning of the series, he is due for parole.

Hank has a difficult relationship with his wife Norma, who (rightly) feels lied to and betrayed by him. Norma is really in love with Big Ed Hurley, as she has been since high school, and the two only married other people due to misunderstandings. Hank's imprisonment provides the couple safety to carry on an affair, and hence they are uneasy about his being free and nearby. Nonetheless, Norma gives a restrained but positive testimony in the parole hearing, ensuring his release, and provides him with a job at her Double R diner.

Upon his release, Hank immediately violates parole by committing a number of crimes and by crossing the Canadian border. He threatens Josie, who had agreed to pay him $90,000 upon his release, and tries to extort more from her.

Hank is hired for a number of shady dealings by Benjamin Horne. In particular, he is responsible for shooting Leo Johnson, after Leo set fire to the Packard Mill on Hank's orders. The shot does not kill Leo, but sends him into a coma. Unbeknownst to him, this was witnessed by Bobby Briggs, whom Leo had been about to kill with an axe at the time.

After crossing the Canadian border on orders of Benjamin Horne, he is captured by Franco-Canadian criminal Jean Renault and becomes involved in his doings, especially the takeover of One Eyed Jacks and the Dead Dog Farm stake out.

Hank decides to punish Ed for the affair with Norma but runs into Ed's superhumanly strong wife Nadine, who beats him to a pulp. Hank spends the remainder of the series on crutches and is eventually taken back to jail for parole violations. Hank tries to get an alibi regarding the night of Leo's shooting from his wife, Norma, while she is visiting his cell to ask for a divorce. Hank coldly replies "you give me my alibi, and I'll give you a divorce". He also calls her Big Ed's "whore", to which she replies that she'd "rather be his whore than your wife."

Annie Blackburn[link]

Annie Blackburn, (b. December 24, 1971) played by Heather Graham, is the sister of Norma Jennings, from whom she gets a job in the RR Diner.

She appears in the final 6 episodes of the series and briefly in the prequel feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. She grew up in Twin Peaks, but, after a painful romantic experience that led her to slit her wrist in a suicide attempt, she went to live in a convent. She hasn't decided if she wants to remain in the secular world, but is willing to see what it can offer her. Despite her lack of experience outside the convent, Annie is not naive about everyday sorrows and transgressions. She may be seen as a mirror for FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, who falls in love with her, and she him.

Annie seems to possess an intangible quality to which Cooper is drawn, almost hypnotically. Annie ultimately begins to represent a dark and painful truth from his past. Subsequently, she is cast into Cooper's urgent quest to elude/capture the progenitor of his increasingly nightmarish existence. In the final episode of the series she is trapped in the Black Lodge by Windom Earle who brings her there as his "Queen" after she wins Miss Twin Peaks (Earle was playing a "sick chess game" involving real people prior to this). At the end of the episode Dale Cooper is himself possessed by the spirit of Bob, and he and Annie depart the Black Lodge.

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Annie appears to Laura Palmer in a dream, bruised and bloodied, to warn her of her death, but as this has yet to happen Laura does not understand the omen. Annie says, "My name is Annie, and I've been with Laura and Dale. The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can't leave. Write it in your diary."

Johnson family[link]

Shelly Johnson[link]

Shelly Johnson, played by Mädchen Amick, is a waitress at the Double R Diner, which is owned by Norma Jennings, a good friend of hers.

Shelly dropped out of high school to marry trucker Leo Johnson, who had swept her off her feet by lavishing her with attention. As soon as they got married, it became clear that Leo just "wanted a maid he didn't have to pay for," in the words of Shelly. Leo is a monstrous home dictator, wife-beater, and dangerous criminal, and he is tangibly connected to Laura Palmer's murder.

Shelly has been having an affair with Laura's boyfriend, Bobby Briggs. Bobby, like Laura, is still in high school, and besides being a jock, he's something of a known hooligan. Although Bobby doesn't quite tread on the right side of the law, he is at least kind to Shelly, unlike Leo. The risk of the affair is great; Bobby deals drugs for Leo and knows just how dangerous Leo is. Leo eventually finds out, and tries to kill Shelly by tying her up inside the Packard Saw Mill and setting it on fire. However Catherine Martell, who was also meant to die in the fire, reluctantly frees Shelly and helps her escape. Catherine, however, vanishes.

During the show's second season, Leo lapses into a catatonic state after being shot by Hank Jennings. Shelly is forced to quit her job at the Double R Diner to take care of Leo at home, where she and Bobby openly flaunt their relationship in front of him, mainly out of frustration that his monthly disability benefits are almost completely used up by the costs of keeping him at home. When Leo awakens from his catatonia and tries to kill Shelly, Bobby comes to Shelly's defense and fights with Leo. Shelly manages to stab Leo in the leg with a knife, and the wounded Leo staggers off into the woods. Shelly later asks Norma for her old job at the Double R Diner, which Norma gladly gives back to her. Shelly - along with Donna Hayward and Audrey Horne - later receives fragments of poetry from former FBI man Windom Earle, as part of Earle's elaborate scheme. At the urging of Bobby, Shelly enters the Miss Twin Peaks contest, which is ultimately won by Annie Blackburn. In Shelly's last appearance Bobby proposes marriage to her, which she would like to accept were it not for the fact that she is still married to Leo.

Leo Johnson[link]

Leo Johnson, played by Eric Da Re, is a trucker who also moonlights as Twin Peaks' primary source of narcotics, which he obtains from the Renault Brothers and traffics over the Canadian/US border for distribution in Twin Peaks. Because of his criminal versatility, Sheriff Truman has never been able to obtain any evidence of his criminal dealings. Leo is married to Shelly Johnson, one of the waitresses at the town diner. Due to his volatile temper, he regularly beats her for both real and imagined transgressions, ranging from her infidelity with high school football player Bobby Briggs to his dissatisfaction with the way she washes the kitchen floor.

In the course of the series, cumulative evidence leads to Leo becoming one of the primary suspects in the murder of Laura Palmer. As it turns out, Leo was simply present on the night Laura was murdered by Killer Bob. While under investigation for the Palmer murder, Leo is hired for his criminal skills by Ben Horne, who charges him with burning down the Packard Saw Mill with his business rival Catherine Martell inside so that Horne can simultaneously kill his competition and destroy the only obstacle to his obtaining the valuable Mill land. Leo decides to use the situation to solve his own marital discord, abducting Shelly and tying her up inside the mill shortly before setting fire to it with a time bomb. Catherine foils his plans by freeing Shelly and helping her escape the mill. When Leo returns home from setting fire to the mill, he discovers Bobby looking for Shelly. Leo tries to kill him with an axe, but is shot by Hank Jennings, hired by Ben Horne to cover his own tracks.

Leo spends most of the second season in a vegetative state, cared for by Shelly and Bobby, who agree to take him in as part of a scheme to commit insurance fraud. The plan backfires, however, when it turns out that Leo's home care is far more expensive than they had anticipated, and the pair are left destitute. To vent their frustration, they take to abusing Leo whilst simultaneously flaunting their relationship in front of him.

Near the end of the season, Leo regains some of his cognitive abilities and attacks Shelly and Bobby. Wounded during the course of a struggle, he staggers into the woods, where he is abducted by escaped mental patient (and former FBI agent) Windom Earle. Earle enslaves the barely coherent Leo by fitting him with a shock collar and forcing him into submission. Leo spends the remainder of the series as a mute drone, serving Windom Earle. In the third to last episode, Leo seems to regain some more functioning ability, as he frees another one of Earle's captives, Major Garland Briggs, believing Shelly's life to be in danger after Earle posts a photo of her on his cabin wall. (Ironically, this gives the impression that Leo truly did love Shelly-in his own cruel way.) In the series finale, Earle leaves Leo for dead, rigging a cage of tarantulas above Leo's head, with a string affixed between Leo's teeth; if Leo lets go of the string, the cage will drop on his face, releasing the agitated tarantulas. His fate is never revealed, though it is rumored that he might have had the cage drop during the third season.

Renault brothers[link]

The three Renault brothers—Jacques, Bernard and Jean—are Franco-Canadians and heavily involved in various kinds of crime, primarily drug running. No two of the three brothers are ever shown together on screen during the series. By the end of the series, all three are dead.

Jacques Renault[link]

Jacques, played by Walter Olkewicz, used to be a woodcutter but had to quit that job because of his considerable weight. He then went to other jobs, working as a bartender at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks as well as a croupier at One Eyed Jack's, a casino and brothel located across the Canadian border. Together with Leo Johnson, he ran drugs from Canada into Twin Peaks. Both Leo and Jacques had (rough) sex with Laura Palmer the night she was killed.

He flees from the Twin Peaks police into Canada, but is questioned incognito by Agent Cooper at One Eyed Jacks. Cooper tricks him into returning to Twin Peaks, where he is ambushed and arrested on the charge of murdering Laura Palmer. Having been shot and wounded during the arrest, he is taken to hospital, where Laura's father Leland suffocates him with a pillow, getting revenge on the supposed killer of his daughter.

Bernard Renault[link]

Bernard, played by Clay Wilcox is the youngest of the Renault brothers. He helps Jacques in his drug running and warns him to stay away from the Roadhouse. He is captured and interrogated by the Bookhouse Boys but refuses to answer their questions. He is later murdered by Leo Johnson and left in the woods.

Jean Renault[link]

Jean, played by Michael Parks, is the eldest and most ruthless of the three brothers, but hides his ruthlessness behind a soft-spoken, charming appearance. He is described as being involved in gambling, extortion, drug dealing and other crimes in the Northwest before his first appearance in the series.

He first appears during Blackie's attempt to wrest control of One Eyed Jack's from owner Benjamin Horne. He reportedly once sold insurance for the brothel to Horne and is also the lover of Blackie's younger sister Nancy. Now, he acts as a go-between between Blackie, who's holding Horne's daughter Audrey ransom, and Horne, but he also has a personal score to settle: he wants to get revenge on Agent Cooper, who he blames for the death of his younger brothers. His intentions are thwarted as Cooper and Sheriff Truman infiltrate One Eyed Jack's and rescue Audrey.

On the night Audrey is rescued, Jean kills Blackie, takes control of the brothel, and acquires the services of Ben Horne's henchman Hank Jennings. Later, he stages a plot to frame Cooper for drug running, leading to Cooper's temporary suspension. He is eventually killed by Cooper during a hostage standoff at Dead Dog Farm.

Blackie O'Reilly[link]

Blackie O'Reilly, nicknamed The Black Rose and portrayed by Victoria Catlin, is the madame of One Eyed Jacks, the casino/brothel just north of the Canadian border. She runs Jack's at the behest of its secret owner, Benjamin Horne. In keeping with the "upscale" theme of the establishment, Blackie adorns herself in glamorous black evening gowns and exudes an air of sophistication and being a member of the "upper class." She is the highest authority at Jacks, aside from Ben Horne, eliciting absolute obedience from the cadre of prostitutes in her stable. Whenever a new girl is hired, she oversees a coin-tossing ceremony between Ben and Jerry Horne to see which man will "break her in."

Blackie is a heroin addict; sometime prior to the beginning of the series, she was the mistress of Ben Horne, who intentionally got her addicted to the drug as a means of controlling her. Blackie resents Ben's control over her, and when Ben's daughter infiltrates Jack's to try to collect information on Laura Palmer, Blackie injects her with the drug to seek vengeance on Horne. This proves to be the first step in a war between Horne and Blackie and her drug baron brother-in-law, Jean Renault, who seizes control of One Eyed Jacks in a hostile takeover. Ultimately, Jean stabs Blackie to death, wanting to eliminate any potential competition he might have in the operation of his new business venture.

Locals[link]

Ronette Pulaski[link]

Ronette Pulaski, portrayed by Phoebe Augustine, is the daughter of Janek Pulaski, an employee of the Packard Saw Mill. She attended Twin Peaks High School.

She worked at the perfume counter at Horne's Department Store, and at One Eyed Jacks, but was fired from both jobs. She and Laura Palmer were both raped and beaten by the serial killer BOB during the crime that drives much of the series. Laura is murdered, but Ronette manages to escape. She is discovered wandering along train tracks in a trance. As she had crossed state lines, the FBI becomes involved in the investigation. She lapses into a coma, emerging only briefly to identify BOB from a drawing.

The character appeared only briefly in the series, with few lines of dialogue, but she proved an integral part of the overall plot, especially as she was with Laura at her end. Her picture, along with that of Leo Johnson's truck, are found in Fleshworld (a swingers magazine) by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, and Sheriff Harry S. Truman, along with a forwarding address which allows them to track down to whom it belonged. She also appears toward the very end of the series when Cooper brings her in to confirm that the smell of engine oil is usually an indicator that BOB is nearby.

She is featured most heavily in both Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the series' pilot episode.

A small aspect of her character in relation to Fire Walk With Me is that she was somehow meant to come out of Laura's murder alive. During the final scene in the train car, Laura sees Ronette's "guardian angel" looking over her as she frantically prays for her life. Ronette's ropes are miraculously cut free, allowing Ronette to open the door to the train car and let MIKE throw the green/owl ring into the carriage. Laura then places this ring on one of her fingers, which forces BOB to kill her instantly rather than inhabit her body against her will, as he desired. Earlier, Laura saw what she believed to be her own guardian angel abandoning her when she saw the angel disappear from a picture on her wall. When Ronette is brought in during the last episodes, she appears to have reformed, dressing demurely and co-operating with the police without question.

Lawrence Jacoby[link]

Lawrence Jacoby, portrayed by Russ Tamblyn, is a highly eccentric psychiatrist. Born January 30, 1934, Jacoby grew up in Hawaii and remains fascinated by it.

Prior to her murder, Laura Palmer was Jacoby's patient. Jacoby confesses to FBI agent Dale Cooper he's not a good person, and he really doesn't care about his patients who see him as their friend. Laura changed all that, and Laura changed him. Laura was in pain and the reasons for that were so mysterious that Jacoby couldn't penetrate the walls she had built around it. Because of this, he has an insight into Laura's personality that few others have. The vision Sarah Palmer has of someone digging up the other half of Laura's necklace (at the end of the pilot) is in fact Dr. Jacoby procuring it.

James Hurley, Donna Hayward and Maddy Ferguson discover that Laura had made a series of audiotapes to Dr. Jacoby in which she describes some of her dreams and nightmares. Believing he has more of these, they hatch a plan to lure him away from his office by dressing Maddy up to look like Laura and filming her making a similar message. When Jacoby goes to confront Maddy he is attacked and beaten unconscious by a masked figure. After a period of recovery he returns to continue his work, mainly with Benjamin Horne and Nadine Hurley.

Dr. Jacoby is married to a Hawaiian woman who is only seen once in the course of the series. He is known for keeping cocktail umbrellas marked with dates of influential events that affected him. He is also a keen surfer. A recognizable trait were his glasses - one lens of which was blue, the other red. He also can do some conjuring tricks.

Dr. Jacoby's character was inspired by the late ethnobotanist and shamanistic explorer Terence McKenna.

Mike Nelson[link]

Mike Nelson, portrayed by Gary Hershberger, was close friends with Bobby Briggs and was the boyfriend of Donna Hayward. He was on both the high school football and wrestling teams. On the other hand, he also dealt drugs with Bobby on behalf of Leo Johnson, their supplier.

As Donna grew closer to James Hurley, she broke up with Mike. Mike initially didn't take the breakup well, but soon became involved with an amnesiac Nadine Hurley. Mike fell in love with Nadine and planned to marry her, but was heartbroken when she regained her memory and had no recollection of her affection for him. It is not known if Nadine went back to her husband, Big Ed.

Mike was illustrative of the theme of duality that pervaded Twin Peaks. He was, with Bobby, one of two duos in the series named "Mike" and "Bob," the other being Mike / Philip Gerard the one-armed man and Bob.

Margaret Lanterman (Log Lady)[link]

Margaret Lanterman, better known as the Log Lady, makes semi-regular appearances in both seasons, and is played by Catherine E. Coulson, who also very briefly reprised the role for a single scene in the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

The Log Lady is a fixture in the town of Twin Peaks by the time of Laura Palmer's murder, and most residents in the town regard her as crazy. This is mainly due to her habit of always carrying a small log in her arms, with which she seems to share a psychic connection, often dispensing advice and visions of clairvoyance which she claims come from the log;^[8] prior to the murder, she delivers moving and cryptic warnings to Laura Palmer herself.^[6][9] The Log Lady does not interpret the messages transmitted by the log, but instead functions as a medium for the information it conveys.^[10]

Harold Smith[link]

Harold Smith, portrayed by Lenny Von Dohlen, has agoraphobia and thus does not leave his home. Laura Palmer met him when she delivered him his meals. Laura gave Harold her secret diary for safe-keeping, because BOB didn't know about him. Harold grows and develops new orchid hybrids in his home. He also makes a habit of recording things people tell him, such as their memories and their deepest thoughts.

Donna Hayward, Laura's best friend, befriended him during her investigation into her death. Their relationship ended badly when Donna and Maddy Ferguson attempted to steal Laura's secret diary, believing it held the key to finding her murderer. His faith in human decency shattered, Harold is later discovered to have hung himself, with scraps of the diary around him. His suicide note reads "J'ai une âme solitaire" (literally, "I have a solitary soul").

Dick Tremayne[link]

Dick Tremayne (Ian Buchanan) is a selfish, pretentious man, whom Lucy Moran saw for a while on the side after becoming bored with Deputy Andy Brennan. He works at the Horne’s Department store, in men's fashion. When he finds out Lucy is pregnant (and isn’t sure who the father of the baby is), he first attempts to have her get an abortion, but then tries (albeit halfheartedly) to prove his capability as a parent by “helping” an orphan boy who needs a father figure. Because of this, he has an ongoing rivalry with Andy, though they bond at a few points. Dick's condescending behavior becomes such that Lucy ultimately decides she doesn't care who the real father is and chooses Andy to help her raise her child.

Dick appears primarily in the latter half of season one and throughout season two.

Outsiders[link]

Evelyn Marsh[link]

Unlike most of the other characters, Evelyn Marsh (Annette McCarthy) did not actually live in Twin Peaks, but one of the towns nearby, which James Hurley "drifts" to, after he flees Twin Peaks in the wake of Maddy Ferguson's murder. She is very wealthy, and she and her absentee husband, Geoffrey/Jeffrey, own a small fleet of expensive cars, which she initially drafts James in to repair.

Evelyn is revealed to be a complex and unpredictable character. She attracts James through a combination of her physical attributes and the pity he feels for her, when she reveals that Geoffrey frequently beats her. In reality, she is involved with a third man, Malcolm Sloan, who lives with the family under the guise of being her brother and acting as chauffeur, and the two have hatched a plan for killing Geoffrey. She engages James in a kind of boy toy sexual relationship, intending to set him up as a fall guy for her husband's death in a car accident. When Donna Hayward comes to find James and talk with him, Evelyn taunts Donna with her relationship with James and warns her off.

Following her husband's murder, Evelyn appears to soften towards the honest, naive James and show repentance for her actions, giving James enough warning to get out of the house before the arrival of the police. She gives his full name to the police and even indicates where they might find him, but seems to waver. When he comes back to talk to her, she pleads for him to leave. Malcolm knocks James out and tries to persuade Evelyn to shoot him, concocting a story to cover the situation, but in the end Evelyn can't go through with it and she shoots Malcolm dead instead when he tries to attack her, allowing James to go free. After this, all we hear of Evelyn is that James is to give evidence at her trial.

Thomas Eckhardt[link]

Thomas Eckhardt (David Warner) is a powerful businessman. He hails from South Africa, but moved to Hong Kong, where he formed a business partnership with American Andrew Packard. The relationship soured as the two competed for the love of Josie, a protegé of Eckhardt. Eventually Josie married Andrew, who took her with him to Twin Peaks. However, it is unclear whether this was in fact part of a plan by Eckhardt, as Josie arranged the assassination of Andrew, covered up by a boating accident.

After Josie has also arranged for the burning of the Packard saw mill and selling the land, Eckhardt expects her to return to Hong Kong. When she refuses and kills Eckhardt's emissary, Eckhardt personally comes for her and insists on a meeting. Josie shoots Eckhardt, but dies only moments later out of intense fear, accompanied by the appearance of "Bob", who mocks the approaching Agent Cooper.

Eckhardt left a puzzle box to Andrew Packard, who was revealed to have eluded his assassination, and Catherine Martell. The box contains several boxes and eventually holds the key to a safe deposit box at the local bank. When Andrew opens the box, a bomb explodes, probably killing Andrew and Pete Martell.

On Eckhardt's order, his assistant, Miss Jones (played by Brenda Strong), also attempts to kill Josie's lover, Sheriff Truman, but he manages to survive.

Teresa Banks[link]

Teresa Banks is a 17-year-old drifter and cocaine addict. Her murder in Deer Meadow, Washington, precedes that of Laura Palmer and is part of the plot of the 1992 Twin Peaks prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Pamela Gidley portrayed Banks in the film.

Banks lived at the Fat Trout trailer park for a month (where minor characters Mrs. Chalfont and her grandson also lived until they moved away following Teresa's murder). She worked the night shift as a waitress at Hap's Diner.

Her body was found, wrapped in plastic, in Wind River. She died from "repeated blows to the back of the head by a blunt obtuse-angled object," according to FBI Special Agent Sam Stanley. The murderer took her ring, which was adorned with a symbol used late in the series in conjunction with the Black Lodge. Stanley also discovered a small piece of white paper imprinted with the letter "T" beneath the nail of her left ring finger, what would become the calling card of the serial killer who later murdered Laura Palmer and attacked Ronette Pulaski. Stanley and Special Agent Chester Desmond investigated her murder on the orders of FBI Chief Gordon Cole. No one claimed her body after her murder, and she had no known next of kin.

Like Laura and Ronette, Teresa placed personal ads in Fleshworld, a fictional swingers magazine known to be read and utilized by Twin Peaks drug dealer Jacques Renault, who also ran a sort of low-key prostitution ring on the side. It was through such an advertisement that she became acquainted with Laura's father, Leland Palmer, who muses "you look just like my Laura" (a later murder, Laura's cousin Madeleine Ferguson, is also said to have been chosen because she resembled Laura).

One day, Palmer arrives at a motel room having pre-arranged a rendezvous with Banks and "some of [her] girlfriends" and, to his surprise, discovers one of these to be his daughter. Palmer ducks out before Laura sees him, but Banks becomes suspicious of his sudden change of heart. Eventually, she discovers Leland's identity and attempts to blackmail him but is subsequently murdered before she can collect.

Windom Earle[link]

Windom Earle is a former FBI agent, who was once partner and best friend to Agent Dale Cooper. He is played by Kenneth Welsh and features in the latter half of the second season as the primary antagonist following the conclusion of the Laura Palmer investigation. He is an evil genius and a master of disguise, well-versed in esoterica from all parts of the world. He has extensive knowledge of the “dugpas”, ancient sorcerers from Tibet dedicated to pure evil. Cooper says of Windom Earle: “his mind is like a diamond: cold, hard and brilliant.”

Earle was institutionalized after killing his wife Caroline, the love of Cooper’s life, and trying to kill Cooper as well. He escapes and comes to Twin Peaks, hiding out in the woods, with the announced intention of ruining Cooper's life before killing him. He captures and enslaves Leo Johnson to act as an unwilling henchman, and finally kidnaps Annie Blackburn to lure Cooper into a trap.

He has a fascination with the Black Lodge, whose secrets he is trying to unlock, as well as black magic. Major Garland Briggs states that Earle was involved in Project Blue Book, as was Briggs; however, their investigation in which Earle was involved was directly related to Twin Peaks and not the usual UFO investigations; his growing obsession with the Lodge led to his dismissal from the project.

He is obsessed with chess and this plays a major role in most of his first appearances, when he decides to use real people as the pieces in a game against Cooper. The true intention of this is to make his way into the Black Lodge, whose power he hopes to harness, while also getting revenge on Cooper. In the Lodge, Earle attempts to take Cooper's soul by stabbing him, but BOB, who says that Earle cannot ask for souls, turns back time to stop this and presumably takes Earle's soul for himself.

Dramatically, Earle represents the dark counterpoint of Cooper: an FBI agent, once pure and following a code representing good, ultimately being corrupted and pursuing evil; the implication being that even a pure soul like Cooper can wind up like Earle, as the Cooper doppleganger represents.

Notes[link]

David Bowie
Bowie during the Heathen Tour in 2002.
Background information
Birth name	David Robert Jones
Born	(1947-01-08) 8 January 1947 (age 65) Brixton, London, England
Genres	Rock, glam rock, art rock, pop
Occupations	Musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, actor
Instruments	Vocals, guitar, keyboards, harmonica, saxophone, viola, cello, koto, percussion
Years active	1964–2008
Labels	Deram, RCA, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Pye
Associated acts	The Riot Squad, Arnold Corns, Tin Machine, The Hype, The Lower Third, The Konrads
Website	davidbowie.com

David Bowie ( /ˈboʊ.i/ BOH-ee;^[1] born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth and eclecticism of his work.

Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture."^[2] The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.

In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album Young Americans, which the singer characterised as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album Low (1977)—the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes", its parent album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and "Under Pressure", a 1981 collaboration with Queen. He then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with Let's Dance, which yielded several hit singles. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was Reality (2003), which was supported by the 2003–04 Reality Tour.

Buckley says of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."^[2] In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million albums. In the UK, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications, 11 Gold and eight Silver, and in the US, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.

Biography[link]

1947–62: early years[link]

David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent,^[3] worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones was a promotions officer for Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in." Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.^[4][5]

In 1953 the family moved to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability.^[6] At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child.^[6] The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard.^[7][8] Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God".^[9] Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that."^[8] By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as "mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet."^[8] Failing his eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined Bromley Technical High School.^[10]

It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford writes:

Despite its status it was, by the time David arrived in 1958, as rich in arcane ritual as any [English] public school. There were houses, named after eighteenth-century statesmen like Pitt and Wilberforce. There was a uniform, and an elaborate system of rewards and punishments. There was also an accent on languages, science and particularly design, where a collegiate atmosphere flourished under the tutorship of Owen Frampton. In David's account, Frampton led through force of personality, not intellect; his colleagues at Bromley Tech were famous for neither, and yielded the school's most gifted pupils to the arts, a regime so liberal that Frampton actively encouraged his own son, Peter, to pursue a musical career with David, a partnership briefly intact thirty years later.^[10]

Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician.^[11]

In 1962, George Underwood injured Bowie's eye in a fight over a girl. Bowie owes his unusual eyes to the fact that not all the damage could be surgically repaired. Despite their fisticuffs, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.^[12]

Eyes[link]

Bowie received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood, while wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Doctors feared he would become blind in that eye. After a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation,^[13] his doctors determined that the damage could not be fully repaired and Bowie was left with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil. The latter condition has misled some to believe that Bowie has different coloured eyes, when in reality both irises are the same blue colour. ^[14]

1962–68: the Konrads to the Riot Squad[link]

Graduating from his plastic saxophone to a real instrument in 1962, Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them.^[15] When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his band-mates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million." Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.^[16]

Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul — "I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall.^[16] "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by The Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, the Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, "Do Anything You Say". While with the Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included a Bowie number and Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.^[17]

Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie renamed himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised.^[18] His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, David Bowie, an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years.^[19]

Bowie's fascination with the bizarre was fuelled when he met dancer Lindsay Kemp: "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus."^[20] Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside."^[20] Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie-penned "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie composition, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year.^[21] After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a group with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson; between September 1968 and early 1969, when Bowie and Farthingale broke up, the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.^[22]

1969–73: psychedelic folk to glam rock[link]

[edit] Space Oddity to Hunky Dory

Because of his lack of commercial success, Bowie was forced to try to earn a living in different ways. He featured in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, but was rejected for another by Kit Kat.^[23] Intended as a vehicle to promote the singer, a 30-minute film featuring performances from his repertoire, Love You till Tuesday, was made. Although not released until 1984, the filming sessions in January 1969 led to unexpected success when Bowie told the producers, "That film of yours—I've got a new song for it." He then demoed the song that would provide his commercial breakthrough. "Space Oddity" was released later in the year to coincide with the first moon landing.^[23] Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.^[24] Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street.^[24] This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival".^[25] "Space Oddity" was released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, to become a UK top five hit. Bowie's second album, Space Oddity, followed in November; originally issued in the UK as David Bowie, it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled Man of Words/Man of Music. Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.^[26]

Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They would marry within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence.^[27] Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie now began to sense a lack: "a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally".^[28] The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist.^[28] A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. Known as The Hype, the band members created characters for themselves and wore elaborate costumes that prefigured the glam style of The Spiders From Mars. After a disastrous opening gig at the London Roundhouse, they reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist.^[28][29] Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style; matters came to a head when Bowie, enraged, accused, "You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey.^[30] Not long after, in a move that would result in years of litigation, at the conclusion of which Bowie would be forced to pay Pitt compensation, the singer fired his manager, replacing him with Tony Defries.^[30]

The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, The Man Who Sold the World (1970). Characterised by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by Space Oddity. To promote it in the United States, Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later would depict the singer wearing a dress: taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics, including Rolling Stone's John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall"—and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to "kiss my ass".^[31][32] During the tour Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that would eventually find form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol".^[31] A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars".^[31]

Hunky Dory (1971) found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles, by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as "Kooks", a song written for his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May.^[33] (His parents chose "his kooky name"—he would be known as Zowie for the next 12 years—after the Greek word zoe, life.)^[34] Elsewhere, the album explored more serious themes, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch", a Velvet Underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time^[35] but was ranked No.16 by voters in the All Time Top 1000 Albums.

[edit] Ziggy Stardust

David Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust Tour

With his next venture, Bowie, in the words of biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture".^[2] Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed red, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth on 10 February 1972.^[36] The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the course of the next six months and creating, as described by Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom."^[36] The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), combining the hard rock elements of The Man Who Sold the World with the lighter experimental rock and pop of Hunky Dory, was released in June. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July Top of the Pops performance of the song. The album, which would remain in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old Hunky Dory. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing", and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, became UK hits. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States.^[37]

Bowie contributed backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough Transformer, co-producing the album with Mick Ronson.^[38] His own Aladdin Sane (1973) topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the United States during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. Aladdin Sane spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".^[39][40]

Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity."^[41] His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar.^[42] Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was released in 1983 for the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.^[43]

	"Ziggy Stardust" noicon Sample of "Ziggy Stardust" (1972). A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie performed as the character Ziggy Stardust, backed by The Spiders from Mars.
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After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought: The Man Who Sold the World had been re-released in 1972 along with Space Oddity. "Life on Mars?", from Hunky Dory, was released in June 1973 and made number three in the UK singles chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", would reach number four.^[44] Pin Ups, a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.^[45]

1974–76: soul, funk and the Thin White Duke[link]

Bowie performing during the 1974 Diamond Dogs Tour

Bowie moved to the United States in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles.^[46] Diamond Dogs (1974), parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk, was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's 1984 to music.^[47] The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and number five in the US. To promote it, Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, Cracked Actor, featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems.^[48] He later commented that the accompanying live album, David Live, ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory". David Live nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in Bowie's cover of "Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.^[49]

The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was Young Americans (1975). Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now."^[50] The album's sound, which the singer identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees.^[51] Young Americans yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon would call Bowie's work as "great, but just rock and roll with lipstick on".^[52] Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the US variety show Soul Train, Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years", his November single,^[53] that it was offered to Elvis Presley to perform, but Presley declined it.^[53] Young Americans was a commercial success in both the US and the UK, and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US.^[54] Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "for all his record sales (over a million copies of Ziggy Stardust alone), existed essentially on loose change."^[55] In 1975, in a move echoing Ken Pitt's acrimonious dismissal five years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door."^[55] Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman in turn would be awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.^[56]

Bowie as the Thin White Duke at Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto on 26 February 1976

Station to Station (1976) introduced a new Bowie persona, the "Thin White Duke" of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth the same year.^[57] Developing the funk and soul of Young Americans, Station to Station also prefigured the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Harty interviewed the singer for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing conversation with Harty, as described by biographer David Buckley, "the singer made hardly any sense at all throughout what was quite an extensive interview. [...] Bowie looked completely disconnected and was hardly able to utter a coherent sentence."^[58] His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.^[48][59]

Station to Station's January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-and-a-half-month concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set, the Isolar – 1976 Tour highlighted songs from the album, including the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would continue as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and was detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia.^[60] Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, the singer waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in NME. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave.^[61] He later blamed his pro-Fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke.^[62] "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ...".^[59] According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in The Times, "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs."^[63]

1976–79: the Berlin era[link]

Bowie performing in Oslo on 5 June 1978

Bowie moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use increased; so too did his interest in pursuits outside his musical career. He took up painting, and produced a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Brücke Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. [...] Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography".^[64]

Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy.^[65] During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, The Idiot, and its follow-up, Lust for Life, touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977.^[66] Low (1977), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, Low yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of Station to Station in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described Low as "a work of genius" in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his Symphony No. 1 "Low"; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 Symphony No. 4 "Heroes".^[67][68] Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".^[69]

	"Heroes" noicon Sample of "Heroes" (1977). One of the ambient rock songs to emerge from Bowie's Berlin Trilogy era, "Heroes" gained lasting popularity.
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Echoing Low's minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, "Heroes" (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like Low, "Heroes" evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin.^[70] Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French.^[71] Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Marc Bolan's television show Marc, and again two days later for Bing Crosby's televised Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.^[72]

After completing Low and "Heroes", Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. [...] Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends."^[73] Recordings from the tour made up the live album Stage, released the same year.^[74]

The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", Lodger (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, in places incorporating Hejaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop.^[75] The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's Sergeant Pepper [...] a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." Lodger reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ".^[76][77] Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angela initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980.^[78]

1980–89: from superstar to megastar[link]

Serious Moonlight Tour 1983

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) produced the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time.^[79] While Scary Monsters utilised principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Robert Fripp, Pete Townshend, Chuck Hammer and Tom Verlaine.^[80] As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway on 24 September, starring in The Elephant Man.^[81] The same year, he made a cameo appearance in the German film Christiane F., a real-life story of teenage drug addiction in 1970s Berlin. The soundtrack, in which Bowie's music featured prominently, was released as Christiane F. a few months later.

Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1981 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Baal. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film Cat People came out, Bowie's title song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30.^[82]

Bowie reached a new peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with Let's Dance. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top twenty hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of acclaimed promotional videos that, as described by biographer David Buckley, "were totally absorbing and activated key archetypes in the pop world. 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aborigine couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially censored) beach lovemaking scene (a homage to the film From Here to Eternity), was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. Let's Dance was followed by the Serious Moonlight Tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms. The world tour lasted six months and was extremely popular.^[83] Stevie Ray Vaughan was guest guitarist playing solo on "Let's Dance".

Performing during the critically maligned Glass Spider Tour, 1987

Tonight (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean". Bowie performed at Wembley in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premièred, Bowie's duet with Mick Jagger. "Dancing in the Street" quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group to record "This Is Not America" for the soundtrack of The Falcon and the Snowman. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US.^[84]

Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners. It was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film Labyrinth, for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's Never Let Me Down, where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In, Day-Out" (his 60th single), "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album".^[85] Supporting Never Let Me Down, and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour commenced on 30 May. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.^[86]

1989–91: Tin Machine[link]

Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, whom Bowie had known since the late 1970s for their contribution, on drums and bass respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust For Life.^[87]

Bowie in Chile during the 1990 Sound+Vision Tour

Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making.^[88] The band's album debut, Tin Machine (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book."^[89] EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production".^[90] The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK.^[89] Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member.^[91] A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label.^[92] Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band.^[93] Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.^[94]

In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992.^[95] Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. Tin Machine II's arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of four ancient nude Kouroi statues, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless.^[96] Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.^[97]

1992–99: electronica[link]

Bowie performing in Finland in 1997

In April 1992 Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, following the Queen frontman's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part.^[98] Four days later, Bowie and Iman were married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew: the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead.^[99]

1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced Black Tie White Noise. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with Let's Dance producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say".^[100] Bowie explored new directions on The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in Black Tie White Noise, and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.^[101]

Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial Outside (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles.^[102] In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.^[103]

Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.^[104] Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, Earthling (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film Showgirls was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US Billboard Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997.^[105] Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for The Rugrats Movie. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'".^[106] The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.^[107]

1999–present: neoclassicist Bowie[link]

Bowie (left) on-stage with Sterling Campbell during the Heathen Tour in 2002.

Bowie created the soundtrack for Omikron, a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album 'Hours...' featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant.^[108] Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica.^[109] Sessions for the planned album Toy, intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions was the 2002 album Heathen.^[110] Alexandria Zahra Jones, Bowie and Iman's daughter, was born on 15 August.^[111]

In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes".^[112] 2002 saw the release of Heathen, and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual Meltdown festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's Low era.^[113] Reality (2003) followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.^[114]

Bowie in 2009 with his son Duncan Jones at the premiere of Jones' directorial debut Moon

Since recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie has reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film Shrek 2.^[115] During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the film Stealth.^[116] He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon.^[117] He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album Return to Cookie Mountain,^[118] made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio,^[119] and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album No Balance Palace.^[120]

Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006.^[121] In April, he announced, "I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums."^[122] He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released.^[123] He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive,^[124] a performance that marks the last time Bowie performed his music on stage.^[125]

Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event,^[126] and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head.^[127] On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix.^[128] A Reality Tour, a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.^[129]

In late March 2011, Toy, Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the internet, containing material used for Heathen and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard new versions of his early back catalogue.^[130][131]

Acting career[link]

Biographer David Buckley writes, "The essence of Bowie's contribution to popular music can be found in his outstanding ability to analyse and select ideas from outside the mainstream—from art, literature, theatre and film—and to bring them inside, so that the currency of pop is constantly being changed."^[132] Buckley says, "Just one person took glam rock to new rarefied heights and invented character-playing in pop, marrying theatre and popular music in one seamless, powerful whole."^[133] Bowie's career has also been punctuated by various roles in film and theatre productions, earning him some acclaim as an actor in his own right.

The beginnings of his acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise (later made into the 1970 television film The Looking Glass Murders).^[134] In the black-and-white short The Image (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him.^[135] The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel The Virgin Soldiers saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra.^[135] In 1976 he earned acclaim for his first major film role, portraying Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien from a dying planet, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, directed by Nic Roeg. Just a Gigolo (1979), an Anglo-German co-production directed by David Hemmings, saw Bowie in the lead role as Prussian officer Paul von Przygodski, who, returning from World War I, is discovered by a Baroness (Marlene Dietrich) and put into her Gigolo Stable.

Bowie took the title role in the Broadway theatre production The Elephant Man, earning high praise for an expressive performance. He played the part 157 times between 1980 and 1981.^[81] Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a 1981 biographical film focusing on a young girl's drug addiction in West Berlin, featured Bowie in a cameo appearance as himself at a concert in Germany. Its soundtrack album, Christiane F. (1981), featured much material from his Berlin Trilogy albums.^[136] Bowie starred in The Hunger (1983), a revisionist vampire film, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, based on Laurens van der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower, Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Bowie had a cameo in Yellowbeard, a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film Into the Night. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).^[137]

Absolute Beginners (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy Labyrinth found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins.^[138] Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in The Linguini Incident (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western Il Mio West (1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region.^[139] He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's Everybody Loves Sunshine (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of The Hunger. In Mr. Rice's Secret (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in Zoolander.